1,000 Greatest Drivers: Fred Lorenzen

A late tribute to one of NASCAR's most underrated legends.

I visited my mom in the rehab center yesterday and I didn’t have time to get this done, so I’m going to try to do both this article and the Denny Hamlin article tonight. I was hoping to get this one done before Daytona 500 qualifying, but I didn’t quite make it. Although I always knew Lorenzen was a great driver, he was somebody I suppose I took for granted as I didn’t really understand the true scope of his greatness until I did more research. In my earlier years as a fan, I would automatically have assumed that the best driver to never win a NASCAR championship in that era was either Junior Johnson or Fireball Roberts solely because they had more wins (and I nearly always would have said Roberts in those days). Now I think Lorenzen is better than those two by far. Not only does he have the highest winning percentage of the three, he also faced better competition than either, he has stock car titles in other divisions and they don’t, and he was by far the highest of the three in my model (Lorenzen was 8th in my model at .253 to Johnson’s 34th (.147) and Roberts’s 66th (.046)), and indeed Lorenzen’s head-to-head teammate records are pretty amazing when considering the extremely high quality of his teammates. Maybe I still wouldn’t take him over Mark Martin or Hamlin all-time since obviously they had more longevity and deeper fields than even Lorenzen did, but as far as the pre-modern era guys, he seems to stand alone and that is not something I think I would have said ten years ago.